Based on his fate-swiped real-life romance with wife Emily Gordon (his co-writer here), this Sundance Festival smash about a culture-clash Chicago courtship starts out full of low-key charm. Up-and-coming stand-up Kumail (Nanjiani) can’t commit to quirky psychology student Emily (a feisty Zoe Kazan), despite their great rapport. Bombarded with potential brides for an arranged marriage by his traditional Muslim family, he’s torn between family loyalty, his longing for stand-up success, and a love match.

Like a hipster My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the film mines his parents’ relentless interference (his mother’s endless chain of ‘just dropped in’ eligible Pakistani girls is a running gag). Yet it’s affectionate rather than snarky. Acute about the problems of being a present-day American Muslim, the script is thoughtful but not earnest, and gutsy enough to drop a deadpan 9/11 joke that’ll get you gasping.

However, just when you think we’re in producer Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up territory (man-child hero, wisecracking pals, emotional dilemma), the story swerves bravely into unexpected trauma. A mystery illness slams Kazan’s Emily into a medically induced coma, and Kumail into turmoil. This sudden burst of drama gives the film backbone and real jeopardy, as Emily’s parents Beth and Terry (Holly Hunter and Ray Romano) start a bedside vigil, where Kumail must earn his place.

Here’s when director Michael Showalter’s straightforward style comes into its own. Rather than While You Were Sleeping-ish screwball stylings, the film finds laughs in the awkwardness of the trio coming together. Nanjiani, his stage act morphing from one-man shows about Pakistani politics and cricket rules into a career-threatening confessional meltdown, shows a new range.

Hunter, who can slide from frail to fierce in a glance, is a delight, launching herself at a comedy-club heckler ordering Nanjiani to “Go back to Isis”. But Romano’s laconic, gaffe-prone Terry is the revelation, showing off the film’s careful, rounded characterisation with brio.

Injecting tension and tear-jerking moments among its gags, the film still manages to dodge both sickbed sentimentality and romcom predictability. Honest as well as hilarious, it deserves to propel the talented Nanjiani to the headliner status that Apatow-assisted comics such as Seth Rogen and Amy Schumer have claimed.

THE VERDICT: Mixing a rom-coma into the romcom, this smart, sweet and highly personal love story finds a winning formula.

Hounds of Love

Pop watchers, beware. Aussie writer/director Ben Young’s tough, terrifying and terrifically played kidnap thriller-as-character study shares about as much with Kate Bush as a rottweiler does with a rabbit.

Vice-tight and part-drawn from grim truth, Young’s mid-’80s-set debut pulls us unnervingly close to serial-killing spouses John (Stephen Curry) and Evelyn (Emma Booth), whose home life in Perth takes all the fun out of dysfunctional. And it looks even worse when they kidnap 17-year-old rebel Vicki (Ashleigh Cummings), whose eyes become our POV for the unfolding horrors.

If comic actor Curry’s transformation into a sleaze’tached wife-beater startles, Booth is more staggering still, especially when Evie’s tragic/terrifying inner fissures become exposed. Susie Porter offers small relief as Vicki’s dogged mum, but don’t get comfy: you’ll gnaw your knuckles to the bone before Young offers a sniff of catharsis.

THE VERDICT: A ferocious debut, charged with depth and dread. Set alongside Snowtown as a must-watch you can barely watch.

47 Meters Down

Set in Mexico though largely shot in underwater tanks in Basildon, this tale of two sisters trapped in a shark cage on the ocean floor serves up some undeniably tense moments that easily rival The Shallows.

Yet it also boasts some unintentionally funny ones, such as one of the sibs promising “I’ll be right back!” or Captain Matthew Modine halting the rescue effort to explain nitrogen narcosis.

Howards End

A 4K restoration marking the 25th anniversary of this ‘heritage’ drama (nine Oscar noms!), adapted from E.M. Forster’s novel. Centred on the titular country house, the story follows two upper-class families in Edwardian England.

Choice performances from Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, but any social criticism is weakened by the veneration of the privileged milieu.

The Wall

American snipers John Cena and Aaron Taylor-Johnson are caught in the crosshairs of their Iraqi opposite number in a relentlessly taut thriller, a cautionary tale on the folly of starting wars you can’t finish.

Director Doug Liman pares the action down to its elemental essence, while Laith Nakli, only heard as lethal sharpshooter Juba, provides the best unseen antagonist since Kiefer Sutherland in Phone Booth.

Fun when it nods to Final Destination’s ghoulish pleasures, it descends into illogic and cringey teenspeak; all but the least demanding viewers will end up wishing they were watching a slightly better film.